Heroic fishing workers

Text 1: The Gutters of Craigmorn, by Isabella Gaunt

An original travel writing written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

I reached the little harbour of Craigmorn at the height of the herring season, when the whole town smells of fish and talks of nothing else. The boats had come in at dawn, low in the water with their catch, and by eight o’clock the quay was lined with long wooden troughs heaped with silver, and at every trough stood three women with knives.

I have seen many kinds of labour, but none so swift. A gutter takes up a fish, slits it, flicks out its insides and tosses it into a barrel behind her before the eye can follow, and does this, I was told, some forty times in a minute. Their fingers are bound with strips of rag against the knife and the salt, and still the cuts open, so that by noon the rags are red. They work in the open, in the wind from the sea, from first light until the troughs are empty, and they sing as they work, in a language I did not understand, which made the whole scene oddly solemn, like a service in a church of fish.

In the afternoon the wind rose, and two boats that had gone out again had not returned. The singing stopped. The women went on working, but they looked up at the harbour mouth between every fish, and nobody spoke. At six one boat came in. The other came in at dark, with her mast broken, and a woman beside me who had not stopped gutting for ten hours put down her knife and sat on an upturned barrel and wept without making a sound. Then she wiped her face, took up her knife, and finished the trough.

Text 2: Deckie Learner, by Alan Rudd

An original twentieth-century memoir.

In the winter of 1964 I sailed as a deckie learner on a trawler out of the Humber, bound for the fishing grounds off the north of Iceland. I was sixteen. I had a new jersey my mother had knitted, a pair of borrowed boots and no idea what I had signed up for.

Up there, in January, the sea does things you do not believe until you have seen them. Waves came over the bow like falling buildings. Spray froze where it landed, and the ice built up on the rails and rigging until the ship grew top-heavy, and we had to go out with axes and hack it off before it rolled us over. I worked eighteen-hour shifts gutting fish on an open deck with my hands so cold I could not feel the knife. Twice I saw men knocked flat by water and caught by the man next to them a second before they went over the side.

People sometimes call us heroes, especially now that the industry has gone and there are statues on the dock. I never felt like one. Heroes choose. We went because it was the best money a lad with no qualifications could earn, and because our fathers had gone, and because it never occurred to us there was anything else. We drank most of what we made in three days ashore and then went back. If there was anything brave about it, it was the kind of bravery you do not notice because you have no choice. I am proud I did it. I am not sure that is the same thing as being a hero.

‘Both texts present the fishing workers as heroic.’

How far do you agree with this statement?

In your answer you should:

• discuss what we learn about the work and dangers faced by the fishing workers
• explain how far you agree that both texts present the workers as heroic
• compare the ways the writers present the fishing workers.

Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.